Chapter 16 A Bargain with the Devil #2
There was no way Ned could sleep, and so only a few hours after leaving the dressing station, he was again lurking outside of it.
A lifetime of hiding in plain sight had taught Ned that the biggest mistake one could make was to draw attention to oneself, but tonight Ned was too exhausted to come up with a deception.
He simply waited until the orderly was tending to men at the other end of the tent to sneak inside.
Charlie was still on the stretcher where they had left him, slightly off to the side from the other injured men.
Ned hunched down beside him. He was unconscious, damp with sweat, and the stretcher shook with his constant shivering.
Ned had assumed that Charlie was around his own age, but seeing the softness that edged his face, Ned realised Charlie was likely several years younger.
Very gently, Ned pulled the blanket up tighter around Charlie, brushing the soft brown curls out of his eyes, remembering doing the same gesture in the pit, thinking he was dead.
Ned had planned to wake Charlie, but he couldn’t bring himself to disturb any peace Charlie had found. “Please don’t die,” he whispered instead.
Ned had loved before. He’d actually written poetry about past affairs.
His first kiss had been in the grass in Christ Church Meadow, after six months of glances across the dining hall.
When it came to Charlie, Ned had always been a bit ashamed of himself.
Their encounters were so physical, Ned unusually driven by his basest desires.
But Ned had never tried to separate emotions from sex, and he had wanted to keep that part of himself, even in the trenches.
So even though it was the most dangerous thing he could have done, Ned let himself fall for Charlie.
With each little conversation, each shared cigarette, each moment Ned revealed all the intimate parts of himself he’d hidden from the rest of the world, he fell a little harder for Charlie, even as Charlie decreed their time together as merely a way to survive.
Was it only ever going to lead to heartache?
Of course. Ned had known that from the very moment he’d asked Charlie to call him by the name he used for himself.
Ned leaned in so close that his lips almost brushed against the delicate shell of Charlie’s ear.
“I have no right to ask you to stay for me, but please don’t leave me alone.
Please, Charlie. I promise the hospital won’t be so bad, it might even be some ancient French chateau.
You can take a picture and show me you playing the lord.
I bet there will be plenty of nice-looking nurses for you to flirt with.
Maybe some nice-looking orderlies. I won’t even care.
You might get convalesced back in London for a bit. And then…”
Then Charlie would come back to the front. Ned couldn’t say the words.
What sort of fate was that? In the darkness of the dressing station, surrounded by the moans of a dozen injured men, Ned confronted what he had known since binding Charlie’s injuries. A man simply doesn’t get matching slits on the insides of his wrists by accident.
It had not been the first time Ned had seen men seek a permanent way out of Flanders, but he never would have guessed Charlie would be so desperate.
Or would he? Charlie had been in the division at least at long as Ned.
He had dug trenches for days, marched halfway across the country, and had admitted that he didn’t even remember how many times he had gone over the top.
Charlie had watched friends die in his arms. Had spent a gruesome three weeks straight on the front as field punishment, which Ned had never been able to get a straight answer about.
There had been that night of drinking, and that look of pure terror before the fighting at the Scarpe.
Hadn’t Charlie mentioned something about not sleeping?
Doctors at home were writing about something called shell shock. Sufferers were sent to sanatoriums.
Ned could almost see Charlie quirk his eyebrow at him.
Officers were sent to the sanatoriums. Wealthy people.
Not a working-class boy from London. Certainly not one that had already committed the treasonous act of self-harm.
What had Charlie told him? The French sent men who had committed self-harm over the top without their guns?
Mother England would be doing the same if a man in a state like Charlie was sent back to the front.
Maybe next time Charlie would simply walk into the gunfire.
Charlie moaned and twisted in his blanket, bringing Ned back to the dressing station's misery. Ned had signed up for the Expeditionary Force with visions of self-sacrifice and heroism dancing in his eyes. What had Ned really done? He was an administrator for death.
Yet being an administrator had its own advantages.
His father had explained to him all about how a safer post could be arranged.
Who would need to be convinced, who would sign the papers.
If others could arrange it for Ned, surely he could arrange it for Charlie?
Charlie could drive a motor. Didn’t the general staff have drivers to get them around the battles?
He wouldn’t be out of danger entirely, but the general staff never got properly close to the action.
Yet pushing Charlie into a safer post would be exactly the sort of high-handed behaviour Ned had vowed to Charlie that he would never do. “I will never violate that trust.” Trust that Ned would treat Charlie as a man and not a pawn.
Charlie would likely never forgive him. Ned would be alone again, trapped in a permanent mask of being the perfect English officer.
Ned had a classical education, and he knew all the different ways to sacrifice oneself. Charlie's anger would be worth it if Ned got to live in a world where Charlie breathed instead of winding up dead in a cold French grave.
Ned would need to work fast, start pulling in favours now. His mind was already thinking through who he could contact on the telephone lines.
There was one last important thing he needed to do. He had to say it. He couldn’t not.
“I love you, Charlie Villiers,” Ned whispered. Then he laid one last kiss on Charlie’s lips before sweeping out of the dressing station.